To the Stars

On Saturday, the Brackett Rocket, a piece of playground equipment repurposed as a sculpture, will be unveiled. If you’re in the Longfellow/Seward area, swing on by; Saturday, Oct. 6 - 3-5 p.m. Brackett Park, 28th St. E & 36th Ave. S, Minneapolis.

Yesterday I noted that I didn’t have a science fiction book in Google’s list of challenged books that would pair nicely with pictures of rockets. That doesn’t mean, of course, that science fiction books haven’t run into some trouble from the Powers that Be. Since science fiction is particularly ripe for use as satire and criticism, it has often raised the hackles of the comfortable.

If, that is, they figure out what’s going on behind the rocket ships and ray guns.

I ran across a snippet of a scholarly piece by Sonja Fritzsche on Ursula K. Le Guin’s publication history in East Germany. Le Guin, along with Asimov and Vonnegut, was one of the few Western science fiction writers to be published in the GDR. Asimov was allowed as a “bourgeois secular humanist”–benighted, perhaps, but not too dangerous to the Socialist Future–but Le Guin was a more slippery fish: though her books often contain critiques of capitalism, she is too much of an anarchist to be completely trustworthy. The two Le Guin books that were published seem odd choices for the snitch-ocracy of Stasi-land: “The Left Hand of Darkness”, which features a totalitarian state, Orgoreyn, which has an East German feel to it; and “The Dispossessed”, one of the classics of anarchist fiction. Perhaps some censor in the GDR had a bit more sense of humor than is normally permitted in such bureaucracies.

On this side of the Berlin Wall, Le Guin’s books have met occasional challenges in public libraries and schools: “The Lathe of Heaven”, “The Left Hand of Darkness”, and the Earthsea books have all run into spots of trouble. Last year, her YA novel Voices was released to coincide with Banned Books Week. Her books are available on most library shelves, tucked away in the science fiction and young adult ghettos; they’re certainly worth a visit.